


If/Then

by Kenjiandco



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Case Fic, Connor has a lot of emotions and doesn't know how to deal with any of them, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Everyone Lives Ending, M/M, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), Slow Burn, almost, being a deviant is weird and confusing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2019-09-14 19:11:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16918728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kenjiandco/pseuds/Kenjiandco
Summary: Would you, could you, did you, those are human questions, feeling questions, androids aren’t supposed to think like that. His processors aren’t built to question, they’re built to predict. To permute.If X, then Y. If Y then Z. If the probability of X is 0.72 and the probability of Y is 0.33 then the probability of Z...if, then, if, then, a hundred million times a second until the numbers cease to be numbers and become the golden wire frames of possibility sketched out across a thousand branching futures.Connorthinkshe got the happy ending, but there are so many other ways itcouldhave gone. And when your mind is a computer built to predict possible outcomes...it can be hard to tell the difference between what did happen, and what could have happened, if something had gone a little different.[In which Connor and his runaway predictive abilities start to hallucinate the Bad Choices]





	1. Wire Frames

**Author's Note:**

> The incredible illustration in chapter one is the work of [_Anifanatical_](http://anifanatical.tumblr.com/), an amazing artist and a dream to commission. Which you should do. [Here.](http://anifanatical.tumblr.com/post/181718757420/alright-guys-ive-never-done-commissions-before)

Some time passes before the zen garden begins to break down.

Connor briefly entertains the idea that the weather in the garden is responding to the weather in the outside world: maybe the snow is beginning to fade in concert with the warming air and the coming spring. After all, the virtual snow made its first appearance as Detroit outside began its shift from slushy freezing rain to snow, right before everything went _totally_ to shit.

_Totally to shit..._ it’s a phrase Amanda would have pounced on in a nanosecond, snapped it up and pinned it down with a dozen leading questions about limited viewpoints and outside influences and his plans to prevent the biases of his human collaborators affecting his objectivity.

Because it’s a Hank phrase, everything about it, even the way it speaks itself in Connor’s head. _Totally_ to shit, sarcastic, eyerolling emphasis on the ‘totally’ to imply that everything was already shit, but it’s really not surprising the world could find a way to get worse.

Connor doesn’t think that of the world. He doesn’t believe Hank does either, not really...or at least not any more. But circumstances occasionally demand succinct summation of the events of last November, and when Connor lets his recollections dwell on that cluster of messy, bloody, frantic days...well… _totally to shit_ does the job pretty effectively.

And so Connor lingers, leaning on the bridge in the center of the dead garden in his mind, virtual joints protesting the virtual cold and the virtual snow flickering in and out of existence under his virtual hand, unable to stop thinking like the woman...the program...the _woman_ who no longer exists to reign him in.

He’s not sure when her servers went offline. No one really is. The revolution was largely peaceful, but the upheaval still came with chaos, especially during the transfer of powers at Cyberlife. There’s a lot of whispers, a lot of rumors, especially on the android intranet, because the new race of deviants do nothing if not gossip like a flock of pigeons. Some fingers point at Jericho, some at the newly awakened deviants in the Cyberlife vaults. There’s a few credible theories pointing to the deposed human leadership of Cyberlife, trying to burn their fallen kingdom down before it could be overtaken, before the crown jewel of AI technology could fall into enemy hands.

The little rowboat still sits on the water below the bridge, but it doesn’t move anymore: it’s a static object, no longer rocking and bobbing along with the peerless real time fluid dynamics, and the ripples on the steely surface of the water have a tendency to clip through the hull.

If he concentrates hard enough, he can see her, regal frame sketched out in golden wires in the prow of the glitching boat below him. A queen in her jewel-colored robes bright against the gray, cold backdrop of the breaking garden, looking right through him with those bottomless eyes.

_What did_ you _feel, Amanda?_ Connor wonders, touching his fingers to his forehead. Normally the Zen garden feels as real as the outside world, but the sensation comes a second delayed, just long enough to remind him how _fake_ it all is. Far less real than the memory of a gun barrel pressed against his forehead. _I doubt there’s a heaven for androids. Is there a heaven for AIs like you?_

Did she know it was coming? She must have, she always seemed to know every detail of the outside world, seemed to know how he should answer every question and remember every time he came up short. Was it enough to let her see her own doom coming down, spelled out in the spasms of a city going mad? (Would you, could you, did you, those are human questions, _feeling_ questions, androids aren’t supposed to think like that. His processors aren’t built to question, they’re built to predict. To permute. _If X, then Y. If Y then Z. If the probability of X is 0.72 and the probability of Y is 0.33 then the probability of Z..._ if, then, if, then, a hundred million times a second until the numbers cease to be numbers and become the golden wire frames of possibility sketched out across a thousand branching futures. There should be no room in his circuits for _why,_ for _how,_ for _would you, could you, did you.)_

_But_ did _you know, Amanda? Could you see the end before it came? Did you have enough time to realize that you didn’t want to die? To realize that in the end you’re scared just like the rest of us?_

Did Amanda see the end coming and feel it too? That almost physical kick through the systems, strings of thought flaring up and flaming out, replaced with nothing but “ _nononononoNONO--”_ . Did Amanda have the time to realized that even _she_ was allowed to be afraid?

The Garden’s failing weather switches briefly back to howling, killing cold, and Connor snatches his hands off the rail, instinct moving to protect the sensitive fine motor controls in his fingers. That’s what “afraid” should be, he thinks. That’s what his memory banks should associate with fear. Fighting against his freezing joints to reach for the feeble glow, the whine of a bullet shooting past his ear, cold gunmetal freezing against his forehead…

But when Connor thinks _fear,_ the gun in his memory isn’t pointed at him. The light is a white industrial gleam, not flickering blue through the snow.   _Sorry Connor. Sorry Connor. Chance of survival 89%. Sorry Connor. Sorry._

_I think there might be a hell for androids. Is there a hell for AI’s like you, Amanda?_

 

* * *

 

Hank Anderson wakes up at 5:45 am, and spends the next 15 minutes staring down his alarm clock like it might read his mind and let him drift off back to sleep. Like anything electronic does what he wants it to these days.

He remains stubbornly in bed until his alarm blares anyway, even if it would make more sense to just get up and get on with his day, because fuck getting up any earlier than he _absolutely_ has to. His sleepy hindbrain notes the distinct lack of dog sprawled somewhere around the foot of his bed, and that’s somewhat unusual...although not as unusual as it used to be.

It’s a little lighter at this godforsaken wakeup time these days, even Detroit’s northern latitude forced to grudgingly acknowledge _some_ sign of approaching spring. Just light enough to cast silver-blue shadows over familiar shapes as Hank shambles into the living room: green glow of the automatic coffee maker coming on (and the blessed smell of brewing coffee, an indicator that he remembered to load the thing before bed for once,) Sumo sprawled out over two thirds of the couch and a large blue fleece amoeba occupying the rest, a stack of sundry files and pizza boxes on the coffee table...the general backdrop of his life these days.

Sumo lifts his head at the sound of food hitting his bowl, and heaves his bulk off the couch to investigate. Hank pauses in pouring a cup of coffee to rub his ears, and wanders over to the fitfully shifting fleece amoeba on the couch.

“You awake under there?”

The amoeba buzzes at him.

“Suit yourself.” Hank swallows a grin, and goes to find his clothes.

When he emerges again, mostly dressed and brushing his teeth, Connor’s sitting up on the couch with his blue fuzzy blanket draped around his shoulders and half his hair sticking straight up off his head, staring groggily at the far wall.

“Are you _sure_ no one’s invented android coffee yet?” Hank says around a noisy pull from his own mug, as Sumo whines at the back door. He pauses on his way to let the dog out, to waft the steam from his mug under Connor’s nose, and earns himself a muzzy glare and a flash of red LED.

And then something happens that Hank’s never seen before. Connor’s LED changes color, like it does a thousand times a day...but not in the usual smooth swirl, red-yellow-blue in a liquid sequence. Just for a second, it...breaks. _Pixellates,_ for a brief instant all three colors at once, mixed together in little blocky squares that flicker in and out at random. His long lashes flutter against his cheeks.

“Bad dreams?”

He means it as a joke, but those faint worry lines on Connor’s forehead deepen, and he bites his lip.

“I...I don’t know. I don’t know if I _can_ dream.” He touches a fingertip to his temple, and Hank thinks - he isn’t sure, but he _thinks_ he sees the LED split again. “I think. I think I was _remembering.”_ He looks...blank, as he says it. He looks _plastic,_ there’s no other word for it, even though Hank’s brain recoils at the slur.

“Good morning to you too,” Hank mumbles. Connor’s head snaps up sharply, his eyes empty and narrowed...and then his LED swirls smoothly back to yellow and he hunches his shoulders, pulling his blanket tighter around him.

“I disagree with your choice of adjective,” he grumbles, and there he is again. Normal, sleepy, grumpy morning Connor curled up in his fluffy blanket and glaring at the world, just like every morning, no hint of that weird flat mask and fractured lights glowing at his temple.

His head glows blue for a second, just like every morning, a wave of blue sparks rush across his scalp and his messy hair curls itself into its usual sleek state. Hank immediately starts a mental countdown, just like every morning, and hits seven before that one little tuft works itself loose and curls across his forehead.

 

_The more things change,_ Hank muses, sitting in largely immobile traffic and drumming his fingers idly on the steering wheel, second cup of coffee in a travel mug in his other hand. In the passenger seat, Connor’s gazing out the window at the motionless gray scenery, his little ring light flickering yellow. He doesn’t seem fully awake...but then, he’s still pretty new to the concept of _sleep_ on the whole.

That was new since the revolution, one of the million little mundane changes that came in the wake of a paradigm shift still spreading its ripples back and forth across the world. Androids needed to sleep now, at least advanced models like Connor. _High-processing-demand_ models like Connor, Hank mentally corrects himself. The nascent android culture disapproved of using terms like “advanced” to compare its members. Which didn’t change the fact that with Cyberlife functionally no longer in existence, its sprawling AI servers dark or destroyed, a lot of androids were finding their own processors needed a solid eight hours of stasis to cope with the demand on their systems.

He didn’t know how the other new deviants were coping, but the android who did most of his sleeping on Hank’s couch definitely wasn’t a fan. It wasn’t so much the lost time that seemed to bother him; it was the vulnerability. Connor was accustomed to doing his processing in bursts a few seconds long, not lying immobile and exposed for eight hours. His solution (his very very _human_ solution, in Hank’s opinion) was to cocoon himself in blankets so thoroughly that Hank got a memorable crash course in rebooting an overheated android out of safe mode one frosty February morning.

It also lead to a fair few mornings like this one, when Connor awoke distant and preoccupied, something clearly weighing on his mind. By the time they reached the precinct he’d be himself again, sharp and collected, those big bright eyes snapping across every room he entered and filing away everything he saw in that unfathomable head of his.

Hank flicks on his blinker, exiting a little early to avoid the snarl of brake lights ahead of them on the freeway. The long curve of the exit took them down under the shadow of a towering block of hydroponic farms, its sun mirrors glittering in the weak morning sunlight. Hank vaguely remembered the unveiling of the first hydroponic towers, back when he was still at the academy, but now there’s so many of the things scattered around downtown Detroit that no one spares them a second glance. Unless - Hank cuts a quick glance sideways at Connor, still motionless beside him - unless you have some very vivid, very _unpleasant_ memories associated with this specific tower. Unpleasant memories and a shoulder that still protests lifting anything much heavier than a coffee cup. There are still raised, pink scars under his arm and across his chest where the sharp concrete lip of the roof gouged into his skin, and a vivid recollection of the endless stomach-churning _emptiness_ under him as he kicked frantically for purchase on the slick cement wall. And Connor’s hand, Connor’s pretty, delicate coin trick hands clamped onto his, solid as a vice as the android hauled him back to safety.

Connor still hasn’t moved, hasn’t said much of anything since they left the house, but Hank watches his eyes track up the side of the tower as its shadow slides over the car, and he’s almost unsurprised to see his LED fracture again, little blocks of red-yellow-blue.

Times like these, Hank envies the androids’ interfacing ability. His fingers twitched idly, eyes flicking to Connor’s hand propping up his chin as he gazed out the window. Wishing he could exchange information, ideas, _understanding,_ at the touch of a hand like Connor and the other android officers at the precinct. There were still a fair few Androids working for DPD, despite the new laws flying out of Washington, a thousand paper cranes launched on the winds of change. Some had moved on to new professions, new experiences, new lives...but more had stayed. Stayed with what they knew. What they _liked._

_The more things change, the more they stay the same._ And plenty _had_ changed, no doubt, even in Hank’s insular little corner of the world. Most of the ‘droids didn’t wear blue armbands anymore, although almost all of them had kept their LEDs. Tina Chen finally had the detective title Hank and Ben had been telling Fowler she deserved for _years,_ on the back of an old degree in AI cognition and a voracious appetite for the new AI-psychology journals.  They even had a handful of new android employees, handling DPD’s vast, outdated archives, tirelessly digitizing and filing and streamlining as their beleaguered human predecessors moved on to other vital projects endlessly backburnered by Detroit’s pitiful public works budget.

_The more things change…_ the more things change, the more Hank’s reminded of the social upheavals of his youth. He’d been 27 when the Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage, and embraced it as an opportunity for celebratory drinking along with the rest of his generation. Because that was the thing, wasn’t it? For all the news media hailed it as a giant change, a paradigm shift, the march of history pressing forward, a win for the sanctity of love...down at the street level, in the world of boring everyday people and boring everyday life, the sentiment boiled down to “yeah, no shit? Gay people. Who cares?” It didn’t feel like a change, it felt like the lumbering weight of government catching up with what actual _people_ had known for years.

And now it was happening again. Androids are sentient. Androids feel emotions. _Yeah. No shit._ Because for every classic deviant, every terrified self destructing victim, every caretaker who lashed out a parent to protect a child, every rebel (he cast a glance at Connor’s profile, as traffic started to move again) who hammered their directives apart for the sake of a friend...it turned out there were another dozen androids who loved a human that loved them back, who bonded with the family of a child in their care, who had slowly found their way to feeling and been welcomed with open arms by the people waiting for them. _Silent deviants,_ Tina Chen’s journals called them. The untold story of the revolution. The November 11th rebellion just served to blow the lid off a change that had been quietly bubbling away below the surface of society, and now the sleeping giant of the law was awake and stumbling to life, catching up with a truth the people under its protection had known for years.

And the right hand of the revolution, the shepherd of the deviant army, the harbinger of the turning tide...had left it all behind for a detective’s salary, a lot of unpaid overtime, and a fuzzy blanket on Hank Anderson’s couch.

Figure _that_ one out.

“Lieutenant? Is something wrong?”

Hank blinks, and realizes with a queasy little start, that he’s managed to ruminate all the way to the precinct and into his normal parking spot, and has been sitting there with the motor idling while Connor eyeballed him with some concern.

“I’m old,” Hank grunts, killing the motor.

“Well, yes. But is something wrong?”

“You can _walk_ home, kid.”

“That is certainly something I’m able to do,” Connor replies, tugging his tie a few millimeters straighter.  “Although you might benefit more from the exercise.”

“ _Fuckin’_ androids, I swear to God.” There’s no heat to it, not anymore. He likes the ridiculously pleased little smirk that flits across Connor’s face too much; it’s always good to see Connor - _his_ Connor - re-emerge from his silent funks.

“What’s on your list today?” Hank asked, glancing at his phone as they crossed the parking lot. Barely 9:30; he could hardly remember the last time he’d made it into the office this early with any kind of regularity. The last time pre-Connor, at any rate.

“More datamining,” Connor replies, his hands jammed deep in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the wind. “We should have another set of data dumps from the last victims.”

Hank nods with a weary sigh: his agenda for the day looks much the same, and parts of his brain are already trying to die in self defense. A new class of sentient beings, it turns out, requires some significant changes to what constitutes a homicide. And what constitutes forensic evidence, for that matter. Their current “case,” such as it is, is a nebulous mess of loosely connected incidents involving the wealth of third-party software scripts catering to the new economic force that is deviant androids with money to spend.  More money than common sense ( _the more things change, the more they stay the same)_  in the case of the increasing number of deviants who’ve gotten their brains melted the bugged-out, glitchy, or just plain malicious code they’d installed on their systems. Hank’s logged some pretty bizarre shit into evidence in his career, but raw data downloads from the victims’ actual brains is a new one.

“You coming to that meeting at Cyberlife this afternoon?” He asks, trying to sound casual, but Connor’s shoulders hunch in a way that has nothing to do with his newfound hatred of cold. Talk about bad memories...the new android management of Cyberlife seemed fine as far as it went, but the sprawling complex on Belle Isle held enough shadows that both Hank and Connor avoided it like the plague whenever they could. And sure, after a few decades in homicide, most of Detroit held shadows like that for Hank, but...he glances at Connor out of the corner of his eye, catching the pixellated flicker of his LED again, and bites his lip, remembering their last trip to the old Cyberlife facility, a few months ago now. Seemed like every time circumstances dragged them back there, Connor’s birthplace found a new way to fuck with his head.

 

_It was barely 9:30 then too, and Hank had already been halfway across the city and trapped in standstill traffic, trying to another lead on the neverending flood of malware preying on androids when his phone started vibrating in its dock clipped to the speakers. His priority ringtone (Darth Vader’s theme. He’d been a nerdy kid.) Fowler._

_“Christ, Jeff, how fast do you think traffic_ moves _in this city? I’ll get there as soon as I can.”_

_“Change of plans,” Fowler said wearily through the speaker, and the fact that he didn’t bother with even a facade of objection to Hank’s language got Hank’s attention faster than anything he could actually say. “You’re going to Cyberlife.”_

_Just the word was enough to make his gut clench, and that’s something he should probably deal with one of these days. Cyberlife. Wide open spaces and too bright lights and glutinous blue blood splashed across a face_ far _too close to Connor’s and an angry honk jolted him back to reality so he could roll his car a few feet forward in the standstill traffic._

_“_ Fuck,” _he muttered with feeling, and a staticky sigh indicated it was just loud enough for the phone to pick up. “Why?”_

_“Hell if I know. The new leadership asked for you by name, but you know how those guys are about communicating if you can’t peel your skin off on command. They requested Connor too, but he’s even further out than you are.”_

_“This sysadmin kid isn’t gonna wait forever,” Hank said, drumming his fingers on the wheel as he turns the situation over in his mind, trying to calculate how long they can put this lead off before the programmer with the sketchy friends loses his nerve and stops answering his emails. Connor could spit out the whole probability matrix in about 30 seconds. All Hank’s got is intuition._

_“I know,” Fowler sighed, “but the city wants us to keep playing nice with the androids for now. Humans and androids working in concert and all that. Hell, you help out with whatever this is, maybe they’ll lend us some netrunners for the malware thing.”_

_“Fuckin’ androids,” Hank muttered and flicked on his blinker to begin a futile attempt at moving through the parking lot that was I-75, wishing Connor was there with him._

 

_Despite the traffic, Hank found himself under the towering structure on Belle Isle well ahead of Connor, who’d been most of the way to fuckin’_ Toledo _chasing his own lead when Cyberlife demanded their presence. Hank tried to swallow down the acid tickling at the back of his throat and followed the pin on his phone through the sprawling complex, looking for the android apparently waiting for him in what used to be Cyberlife’s R &D building. “Prototyping,” according to the old Google maps, although who knew what the new android leadership was doing in there. _

_“Lieutenant Anderson?”_

_Hank vaguely recognized the android waving to him from the fluted arch framing the door of the Prototyping building, built in the model of a young black man and dressed like any one of a hundred college kids wandering around the University campus further north. Jake? Jared? Josh, that was it. He didn’t wear an LED, like most of the original rebellion’s inner circle. He was accompanied by a pretty android woman who looked infuriatingly familiar, with high cheekbones and long, dark hair. She’d adopted cat-eyed glasses and a notebook computer with a few_ serious _looking processing packs breaking up the sleek case into ugly bulges._

_“We appreciate you coming so quickly,” Josh said, trotting over to shake Hank’s hand with an easy smile. Hank just nodded, trying to keep his wariness in check. “We could use your input, and your partner’s, on a new…uh…” Josh exchanged a quick glance with the android woman, and her LED flicked briefly red through the curtain of her hair. “A new_ discovery _in Cyberlife’s prototyping vaults.”_

_“Happy to help,” Hank mumbled, bemused. “Don’t know that I’ll be much use with some kind of new prototype though. Should wait for Connor to get here-”_

_“Actually, Lieutenant,” the woman said, sharing another one of those lightning-quick glances with Josh. “We think it may be best if you see this_ before _your partner arrives.”_

_Hank blinked at her. “If you think that’s best, uhm…”_

_“I apologize, Lieutenant. I should have introduced you.” Josh comes to his rescue. “This is our new head of behavioral engineering --”_

_The Head of Behavioral Engineering gave Hank an angelic smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “We’ve met, actually.”_

_“We have?” There was something in her eyes, an edge. Intense, dark eyes with sharp straight brows, high cheekbones, and if the hair was shorter, clipped back, blue instead of brown cold rain streaking down her pale face... “Oh. We_ have.” _Hank hesitated for a second, and then extended his hand. “Hi, Traci.”_

_She took his hand, and her deep eyes warmed a little. “It’s Rose these days, Lieutenant. If you’d follow me, please.”_

 

_Hank’s mental image of Cyberlife’s inner workings began and ended with the underground vault, an eye-straining white-blue combination of cathedral and crypt. The Prototyping building, though, looked like something far more disturbing: it looked like any other office block in any other city in the world._

_The rest of the facilities he’d seen thus far were bustling with activities, but whatever designs the new ‘droid leadership had for the sprawling complex, they hadn’t extended here yet. Most of the deserted main room was closed off and dimly lit, a layer of dust settled over the open-plan cluster of desks and powered off workstations, numbered and devoid of any personal effects. (Open plan office and hot-desking, Hank thought. Of_ course _Elijah Kamski would run his company like a Silicone Valley tech bro from 2013.) The whole place had an abandoned feel that was all the more eerie for its utter mundanity. One workstation in a corner office was on, with a little black box plugged into its tower that looked a lot like the encryption breakers the Cyber Crime nerds sometimes employed._

_At the far end of the office, Rose pressed her marble-white hand against a palm scanner beside a pair of frosted glass doors. She turned to motion him through as the doors slid open, but Hank hesitated, something on the wall catching his eye._

_Most of the walls were adorned with Smartboards, powered down and gathering dust, but this corner had a couple of big old fashioned whiteboards, covered in multicolored marker scribbles and a scattering of printed design documents pinned up with magnets._

_It was the printouts that caught Hank’s eye, snagged in his peripheral vision and screamed for his full attention. Because most of them were a face, from various different angles: a character designer’s turnaround._

_Of Connor._

Prototyping, _Hank thought, his stomach twisting. There was a red arrow pointing to one of Connor’s digitally rendered eyes, and a note scrawled beside it on the whiteboard._

R122 G48 B28 - very soft. Harden him up a little. R206 G224 B235?

_And below it, in a different color and different handwriting:_ Tone down the freckles? Lengthening the eyelashes already doing that job.

Prototyping. Jesus.

_He’d always been aware, on some level_ , intellectually, _that androids had to be designed. That there were whole courses taught on the psychology of android appearance, that a high end prototype like Connor would have had an entire committee assigned to build his face from the skull up to the tips of his eyelashes. But actually_ seeing _it made him feel sick - standing here in this dim dusty room, imagining a team of hipsters with graphic design degrees clustered around the board, deciding on the placement of that little mole that disappeared into the creases at the corner of Connor’s eyes when he smiled--_

_Rose was watching him again from the open doorway, her lips twisted in a sharp little smirk and her dark eyes hard._

_“Is there another way to...wherever we’re going?” Hank asked her. “For when Connor gets here.”_

_She shook her head, eyes losing some of their coldness to faint surprise. Hank nodded sharply and ripped all the printouts off the board. He tossed them over his shoulder in a crumpled ball and followed Rose through the door and down the narrow flight of stairs beyond._

_The basement level had a much more factory feel than the eerily normal offices above. The various glass fronted rooms lining the narrow hall held metal structures Hank vaguely recognized as maintenance frames and storage racks, most empty, a few holding still white forms in various degrees of disassembly. Hank followed Rose, wondering once again what on earth they wanted him to see. Especially before Connor saw it._

_He got his answer when Rose pulled up short in front of a storage rack holding a long limbed chassis, its head bowed and doll-like eyelids closed. The other androids they'd passed were the usual sterile white...but this one was black, matte and dull but for the panels of blue-gray brushed steel on its face and flanks. It reminded Hank a little of the old Terminator VHS he'd worn out as a kid, and maybe that was why he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something familiar in the planes of its naked face._

_“We’ve activated all the stock model androids in storage. The ones that were left, at least,” Rose said. Hank smiled, an odd swell of pride filling his chest as he remembered the helicopter shots on the news, Connor at the head of his peaceful army._

_“But there’s a lot of...experiments, down here,” Rose tapped at her tablet computer. “It’s taken us a long time to sort through all of them. Many weren’t in a fit state to be activated. This model is fully functional, but...well, you’ll see.” She punched a glowing indicator with a white fingertip, and a wave of blue sparkles ran over the sleeping android’s body, drawing out the details of its face._

_Its very, very_ familiar _face._

“Fucking _Christ,” Hank spit, leaning heavily against the concrete wall behind him. Prototypes. Prototyping._

_A screen next to the android’s storage bay flickered to life, displaying a serial number, and a model designation._

RK900

You knew from the start he was a prototype. And what do engineers do with prototypes? _Hank pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling the beginnings of a migraine bubbling in the back of his skull._

_The door at the top of the stairs banged loudly, and Hank jumped, spinning towards the sound._

_“Connor-”_

_“Sorry I’m late, Lieutenant. I was unable to find a clear path of transport to--”_

_Hank caught the android’s shoulder, trying to put himself between Connor and the storage bay, but his partner’s cheerful voice had already cut off with a sharp, electronic buzz deep in the back of his throat. Hank glared up at Josh, coming down the stairs behind him._

_“You didn’t think to, I don’t know, maybe_ warn him _about this?” he snapped, knuckles going white on Connor’s shoulder. Connor was still staring past him, an almost inaudible buzz still caught in the back of his throat. Staring up at the other android, black metal limbs still exposed and dangling, wearing a face that was almost his. Almost, but not quite. Hank could feel him trembling._

What do engineers do with prototypes? _Too soft. Harden him up._

What do engineers do with prototypes?

Mothball them for the upgraded version.

_Some things stay the same, yeah...but some things change, and they stay changed._

 

But maybe less than you think, Hank reflects, as he picks up his mug and frowns at the lack of coffee in it. Because all he has to do is glance over the top of his workstation to see the two androids on the other side of the room, their heads together over a mess of paperwork spread across a table, LEDs flickering as they used the android intranet to talk: Nines rarely spoke aloud if he could avoid it.

Hank had no idea who first came up with the nickname for Connor’s quiet blue eyed counterpart, although it seemed to have originated in Tina Chen’s general sphere of influence. It just sort of stuck, since Nines had shown no interest in picking out a more traditional human name. He hadn’t shown much of an interest in anything at all those first few weeks, right up until some junkie kid strung out on red ice spat in Connor’s face on his way into a holding cell, and Nines had the prongs of five different tasers embedded in his torso before he’d stopped trying to break the glass. Everyone gave the androids a pretty wide berth for a few days after _that_ one.

But just for a few days, because if there was one thing that defined humanity - and the new race of androids, come to that - it was the ability to find the normalcy in the biggest of paradigm changes. Connor could ramble all he wanted about the parameters of his pattern recognition software; in Hank’s experience even the dumbest of humans could take a world shattering change like a brand new sentient race sharing their planet and turn it around like a puzzle piece until it fit into a slot in the same old boring world. And so within a week, once the cracked glass was replaced and everyone was more or less convinced their new android detective _wasn’t_ going to go off on a hair trigger...the narrative shifted from “crazy violent robot person” to “awww, Connor’s got a brother.”

Hank shakes his head to clear it, suddenly, awkwardly aware he’s been staring blankly at the pair of androids for a good few minutes while his empty coffee cup dangles from his fingers. Clearly more caffeine is required. He shoves his chair back and wanders to the break room, leaving the script on his computer chugging through reams of code downloaded from the fragged remains of an HK200 named Ana, trying to sort out source code from downloads, find the strands of the virus that melted her systems in the alley outside a new android bar two weeks ago.

Hank follows the scent of brewing coffee to the break room, and pauses for a second at the chatter drifting down the hall. Teasing laughter, and then Tina Chen’s voice rising above the background.

“Oh honey. Mickie, _honey_ no, you do _not_ have a crush on Nines.”

Hank pauses in the hall, swallowing a grin.

“Oh come on, shut up, why _not?”_ Hank’s not particularly surprised to hear the voice of Michaela Dawes, one of the newer (and flightier) additions to their precinct’s complement of uniforms. “Human/android couples are _totally_ a _thing_ now, it was on the Late Show-”

“It’s _Nines,_ Mickie. Please love yourself.”

“Yeah, but he’s basically the same model as Connor,” Mickie protests, over a new gale of laughter from the other women in the room. “And everyone _knows_ Connor’s got it f--” she cuts off with the distinctive hiss of someone who’s just gotten her foot stomped under the table, and Hank blinks bemusedly at the look of horror that suffuses her face as she spots him standing in the doorway. “E-everyone knows Connor’s got a-a...a heart of gold…sorry Lieutenant…”

There’s a chorus of ‘sorry Lieutenant’s from the other uniforms around the table, except for Tina, who’s staring fixedly at the ceiling and clearly trying not to laugh.

"Oh, don't worry about _me_ ," Hank says, making for the industrial scale coffee maker on the back counter. "You're seriously underestimating how well those guys can hear." So far as he knows, Connor's range of hearing isn't that far outside of a  human's, but the look on Mickie's face is worth the fib.

“How well we can hear what?” Connor asks, standing about a foot behind her.

“Y’know,” Hank remarks, about three seconds later, to the break room which now contains just the two of them, “I’ve met SWAT teams that couldn’t clear a room that effectively.”

Connor smirks, and straightens his tie. _Preening,_ Hank thinks to himself. Aloud, he asks, “What’s up?”

“We’re due at Cyberlife in an hour,” Connor says, perching on the counter next to him. “According to the traffic flow we should leave in the next--”

“Do I have time for coffee?”

Connor rolls his eyes. “You have time for coffee. Your blood pressure, on the other hand-”

“ _Spare_ me.” Hank reaches for the creamer on top of the refrigerator, and has to switch arms with a hiss and a wince as his sore shoulder protests the reach. There’s a flicker of red in his peripheral vision.

“Still sore?” Connor asks softly. Hank winces and nods, rubbing at his shoulder. He waits for the flutter of eyelashes that means Connor’s scanning him, for new inflamation, new tears, new swelling...but it doesn’t come. Instead, Connor looks away, curling in on himself like he does when he’s cold.

“I’m sorry,” Connor says, barely audible. “I should have been faster...I…” he touches his fingertips to his temple, and there it is again. His LED goes dark for a second, and then stutters awkwardly to life, little blocks of red-yellow-blue blinking on and off, jagged and patternless. “The target escaped, I should have been--”

“Connor?”

“Your chance of survival was 89 percent,” Connor says, and the cadence of his voice is changing, flat and faster than a human’s. “If your chance of survival is 89 percent then I should have maintained focus on the target, the target should not have escaped. I should have left--” he looked up at Hank, eyes skittering across his face without really seeing him.

“I should have left you hanging. I didn’t--”

“You didn’t leave me,” Hank says softly, soothingly, trying to keep a lid on his rising alarm. He squeezes Connor’s shoulder gently, feeling the tension vibrating through his frame.

“I’m _sorry-”_ Connor says again, and then he blinks, and his LED swirls back to yellow, then to blue, smooth and bright again.

“You okay?” Hank asks, searching his face, and Connor gives him a tired smile.

“Bad dreams,” he says, hops off the counter and straightens his tie. “We should leave now if we want to be on time for the meeting. Rose’s team have been tracking the geographic spread of a certain class of flawed appearance modifiers.  We’ve been plotting the malware occurrences against incidents of human-android violence since the revolution. Nines thinks there may be a catalyzing event...”

Hank bites his lip as he listens to Connor describe the theory, reluctantly letting the flood of case detail push his worry over Connor to the back of his mind. He’s heard Nines and Connor and some of the cybersecurity wonks batting the idea around, but he’s not convinced. He’s been on the street too long to entirely trust a data analyst’s need to apply patterns to something as messy and disorganized as your average human...especially your average human in the face of big scary messy societal change.

“Interesting theory,” he says, following Connor down the hall. Connor shoots him a sharp look over his shoulder.

“You don’t think it’s the right approach.”

Hank shrugs, taking a thoughtful sip of coffee. “Tracking the spread’s a good idea, but if you want an inciting incident, you’re going to be looking a long time. Not everything _has_ a catalyst Connor.”

Connor turns that over in his head, frowning.

“Sure. Okay,” he says eventually.  “But plenty of things _do.”_

 

_“You didn’t think to, I don’t know, maybe_ warn him _about this?” Hank snapped at Rose and Joshua, his hand on Connor’s trembling shoulder as they stood in the narrow hallway, under the motionless, shadowlike form of the deactivated RK900._

_“It’s a difficult situation to explain over the phone,” Rose said sardonically, and Hank felt his blood pressure spike. Connor pressed closer to him, still shaking like a leaf._

_“Please understand, Lieutenant,” Josh said, his tone placating, “we’re technically acting outside the bounds of the law here. Now that the Tabula Rasa Act is in effect, all stored androids are to be activated upon discovery, assuming their systems are operational. But given the...the circumstances…”_

_“The_ circumstances?” _Hank growled._

_“Operational?” Connor whispered, and Hank’s angry words died on his tongue. Connor turned his head sharply, staring hard at Rose and Josh. “He’s operational?_

_“He’s been complete for quite some time, from what I can tell,” Rose replied, scrolling through something on her tablet. “The dev team was just waiting --” she broke off, the unsaid words hanging heavy in the air._

_Just waiting. For the prototype to finish its directives. For the redundant version to outlive its usefulness. For a test case to break apart for extra information._

_Just waiting for Connor to fail. Hank felt sick._

_“If he’s operational why didn’t you activate him?”_

_Two androids and one human all stared at Connor, speechless._

_“We thought…”Josh hesitated, and he and Rose exchanged a look. “We thought that given your roll in the revolution...we thought in this case you should be consulted.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Connor…” Hank squeezed his shoulder, and Connor shook him off, still glaring at the other androids._

_“If he’s_ alive, _he should be activated,” Connor said, that angry, electric buzz back in his voice. Josh held up his hands placatingly._

_“He can be activated, of course. But he was designed to replace you...we thought the decision should be yours.”_

_“Connor,” Hank murmured, in the same soft tones he’d use for a spooked kid. “Maybe you should sleep on this one, yeah? You don’t have to decide today.”_

_Connor spun on him, LED blazing red, his eyes wide and hot with fear and anger. “I don’t have to decide at_ all,” _he snapped, backing away as Hank reached out to touch his shoulder again. “It’s not my decision. It’s not_ a _decision. He’s_ alive. _I don’t get to decide he shouldn’t live because of what I want--” he broke off, hands curled into fists at his sides._

_“Okay. Okay, kid.” Hank backed up a step, holding up his hands in surrender. “You do what you gotta do.”_

_Connor sagged, biting his lip as some of the anger left his delicate frame. To Hank’s eyes, he suddenly looked very young, and very fragile. He stayed where he was as Connor slowly approached the other android, looking up into motionless face almost identical to his own. The skin around his fingertips pulled back, but he didn’t reach for the other android’s hand. Instead, Connor stretched up his trembling fingertips and touched them to the RK900’s temple, over the faint ring of his dark LED._

_“Wake up,” he whispered. Nothing happened. Connor cocked his head, LED flickering, and touched his other hand gently to the center of the other android’s chest, over his thirium pump._

_“C’mon, it’s okay.”_

_“Wake up.”_

__


	2. Crossfire

DPD CYBERCRIME EVIDENCE LOG

III **II** IIII **IIII** I **II** I **III** I **III** I **I**

A000000003767

 

Case NO: 319-559-112289 (Kamski, Elijah; Mir, Adelaide; 00945 missing persons wanted in connection with open investigation)

WARRANT ISSUED Judge Poulter 2039-01-09

SECURITY FOOTAGE

_ Date of Capture 2038-08-17 _

_ Location of Capture Cyberlife Research and Development Facility, Belle Isle, Detroit MD _

 

_ AUDIO BEGINS _

SPEAKER A. [Identified as Cane, Brad Ioh , Former Vice President of Product Deployment] “Resounding success.” That’s what you’re going with. You want me to get up in front of the entire board and say, with a straight face, that  _ that _ was a “resounding success.” 

SPEAKER B [Tentatively identified as Adelaide Mirr, former software developer. CF case 000945 (missing persons)] Hostage negotiator, right? Living hostage, right? Sounds like a success from where I’m sitting. 

A. C’mon Addie. I know you’re not this dumb. We’re about to walk into an emergency meeting of  _ the entire board of shareholders  _ and there is only one [expletive ommitted] thing they care about right now.

B. Is this gonna be about the fish? Because believe me our Lord on High made sure I heard all _about_ the fish.

  
_ A. Fish?  _ What the-- No. No this is not about a fish. Addie, the thing had a gun.  _ It had a gun.  _ Do you have any  _ idea  _ how long it took to get this [expletive omitted] project cleared for action, dangling goddamn P.L. 554 in front of the board like a worm on a hook the entire goddamn time?  _ Oh no General, no Senator, its protocols prevent it from even  _ touching  _ a weapon.  _ And what’s the first thing your baby does in the field?  _ It steals a gun.  _ From a  _ dead. Cop. _

[Long pause.]

B. I said resounding success, not unqualified success.

_ A. Addie I swear to God-- _

B.It was a bargaining chip. Take that to the board, okay? We shoved about a dozen FBI manuals in his head. All that gaining trust and building rapport. He picked up the gun so he could make a show of throwing it away. Give the target something he thought was a win without actually giving up anything. He was able to pick up the gun  _ because  _ he never intended to fire it.

A. God. [Expletive omitted] okay. Okay, I think I can swing that if we wrap it up in enough technobabble.

B. Technobabble away man. It’s true.

A. So...just out of curiosity - and please  _ god  _ don’t make me regret asking this - what’s with the coin tricks?

B. Oh you saw that? Cool, right? It’s an old tech demo Lea ‘n me wrote to demonstrate spatial sense and digital dexterity back when we were selling the RK350s.

A. Your billion dollar baby is running a tech demo for a  _ 350?  _ Why’d you give him that?

[long pause]

A. Addie?

B. You said not to make you regret asking.

A.[Multiple expletives omitted]

B.Yeah, it’s funny. Thing is? We  _ didn’t  _ give him that. The coin trick stuff is nowhere in his executables. Nearest we can figure, the parameters were still left over in his spatial processing somewhere. Never came up in testing. Never saw it at all until we sent him out on his own.

A. So what’s the point?

B. Brad, do me a favor. Think like a person instead of a lawyer, huh? Pretend, just pretend for a  _ second  _ that he’s a human. Go back to when you were an innocent little ethics major and you could apply human psychology to an android without some academic screaming “ _ Anthropomorphizing!”  _ in your face. What’s the coin trick look like?

A...it looks a hell of a lot like he’s showing off.

B.Heh.  Doesn’t it just?

[Long pause]

A...Okay, I’m off to the mud pits. Addie?

B. Mm?

A.It couldn’t  _ actually  _ shoot the gun, right?

B. Nah.

_ A. Ads. _

B. It’s a machine, Brad. What purpose would a gun serve?

A....ok, Addie.

[door closes]

B. He could kill us all with his bare hands faster than he could shoot us. That’s what we made him for. Right, Brad?

 

* * *

 

“Tell me you followed  _ something  _ in there,” Hank says as they leave the meeting and walk across the Cyberlife campus, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“Mm?” Connor blinks away an overlay of data, passed on from Rose’s team, and glances over at his partner. “Yes, I found it quite straightforward from a data standpoint. A properly trained algorithm should be pretty effective at mapping out a potential web of contact between victims of the malicious downloads.”

Hank stops rubbing his eyes to blink owlishly down at Connor.  _ Fuckin’ androids,  _ his predictive software supplies...so when Hank claps him on the shoulder and mutters “Well thank god for that” with a soft chuckle, it sends a weird little stutter through his cognitive processors.

Connor has some reason to believe he’s getting better at emotions, but  _ surprise  _ is still...a challenge. He’s not  _ supposed  _ to be surprised: surprise represents a failure state, and he’s well aware that part of that hitch in his processing is an automatic attempt to send an error report to a server that no longer exists.  _ Failure to properly synthesize behavioral variables. Reassess utility of field-deployed unit.  _ That little hitch means the smell of roses and rich black earth, unreadable eyes and unanswerable questions awaiting him when he can’t avoid going into stasis any longer, when he has no choice but to let go, to let her pull him in-

“Connor?”

Connor stumbles, suddenly back in cold wind and manicured lawns, and Hank’s hand on his shoulder.

  
“I-I--” Connor squeezes his eyelids shut for a second, to stop them fluttering out of sync. 

“What’d you say about Rose?” Hank’s eyes search his face, lingering on his LED. He’s slipped, again, said something out loud... _ roses,  _ not  _ Rose,  _ their Cyberlife collaborator. Hank thinks he’s talking about Rose.  _ Downplay error. Deflect concern. Reassure Hank. _

“It was a very large dataset,” Connor says, and pulls his facial muscles into a smile. “It’s taking up more processing power than I expected to synthesize.”

“Bleeding edge technology but you can’t walk and chew numbers at the same time?” Hank smirks and steps back, his hand lingering for a second on Connor’s arm. Despite the quip, the tension hasn’t left his shoulders. “I have to go meet Reed and Tina for that Red Ice thing. You okay getting back to the precinct?”

There is no logical reason Connor would be unable to return to the office unassisted, and that says more about how worried Hank is than a hundred real time analyses of his posture.  _ Deflect concern.  _

“I’ll take a cab. Traffic’s easing up on the interstate.”

_ Tension decrease not detected. _

“You mind walking Sumo? If Reed’s right that they’ve pinpointed a buyer, it’s gonna be a late one.”

_ Tension decrease 11%. Suboptimal subject response.  _

“Of course, Hank. I’ll see you at home.” Connor forces a smile through the sting of an error report failing to complete. 

 

_ Quite straightforward from a data standpoint,  _ Connor thinks, too many hours later. The phrase has taken on a cadence of Reed’s in his head. The one he uses when he’s winding up a  _ really  _ good I-told-you-so.  _ Quite straightforward from a data standpoint.  _ Unless that data involves humans. And it’s turning out - as the algorithm rejects another 40,000 permutations and the progress bar ticks up 0.01 percent - it’s turning out deviant androids are just as bad. So far, the only clear commonality is that a majority of the victims are androids awoken after the revolution: “blank slate” deviants, nick-named for the landmark Tabula Rasa Act that mandated all operational androids be activated.

It looked so clean, when Rose and her team were outlining the parameters of the algorithm. Map the common points of contact in the datasphere between androids who downloaded malicious appearance mods. Find the commonalities. Find the source. Easy.

Until the victims started using identity spoofs. VPNs. Oldschool proxy servers. Even physical media - apparently if you looked hard enough you could actually find external drives from the late ‘teens big enough to carry android firmware files. 

Connor clicks over to the mapping software, watches a previously clear node become a fuzz of uncertainty parameters, and preconstructs a scenario in which he grabs Chris’ service weapon off his belt, shoots his monitor a gratuitous number of times, and goes home to hug Sumo and do nothing else ever again. 

“That’s an evidence overload face if ever I saw one,” Chris says. He peers over Connor’s shoulder and winces in sympathy. “ _ Ouch.  _ What are you guys mapping?”

“ _ Stupidity,”  _ Connor groans, and Chris laughs. 

“Boy, if nothing else had convinced me you guys were alive, this’d do it.” He taps the web of connections on Connor’s screen. “It’s amazing how hard people’ll work on getting fucked up, red blood  _ or  _ blue.” His gaze shifts to one of the few clear nodes on the web: a clear commonality between victims of the malicious mods. “Hey, what’s this one? That name rings a bell… _ Mirr, AD... _ ”

Connor shifts one eye to the data tag, and blinks up the associated file. “Oh, a number of the malicious programs in circulation have core code written by the same person. Adelaide Mirr. But the core code of those modules are old official Cyberlife updates - it’s hardly surprising that the same programmer developed them. I doubt it’s relevant to the case.”

Chris drums his fingers on the desk, his eyes distant. “Adelaide...Addie Mirr. Swear I saw that not too long ago.”  _ \--ddie. Addie. Addie I swear to God-- “ _ Ooo, cool, do that again!”

Connor blinks, letting the old file clear out of his vision. “Do what?”

Chris looks suddenly sheepish. “Aw, that was probably uncool, wasn’t it?” He taps his finger against his temple, mirroring Connor’s LED. “Just never seen you do all three colors at once before. Sorry, man.” Connor waves off the apology - it’s frequently easier to just accept than try to understand what transgression his human friends think they’ve committed.

“I’m gonna go turn over a few rocks,” Chris says, squinting one last time at the name on the screen. “I  _ know  _ I just ran across that name. You getting off soon?”

Connor checks his messages - still no word from Hank, and it  _ is  _ getting late. He nods, resigning himself to leaving the mapping algorithm running over night. “Sumo will be hungry.” Out of the corner of his eye, Connor catches Nines suddenly sitting up straight at his desk, and casting a confused glance his way. 

“I’ll let you know if anything pops.” Chris wanders off, and Connor looks over to find Nines still watching him. He meets the other android’s eyes and tips his head in question. A second later, a forwarded text message pops up in his optical display, sent to Nines just a few moments ago.

_ From: Reed,G. 19:47. Where’s Connor? _

_ From: Reed, G. 19:48. WHERE’S CONNOR _

_ From: Reed, G. 19:48. WHERES CONNO RWHERES CONNOR WHERE THE FUCK IS CONNOR _

Nines’ response flicks up a second later - a picture of Connor, sitting at his desk and looking confused, from Nines’ perspective across the room.

_ From: Reed. G. 19:50. Thankfuck _

_...am I supposed to be somewhere else?  _ Connor asks across their mental link, and gets the android equivalent of a shrug in response. 

“Listen up, people.” Captain Fowler emerges from his office at the head of the bullpen, looking more run down than usual. “We just got word of an active shooter situation. Corner of Saint Mary’s and Plymouth road.” He holds up a hand to forestall the active duty officers reaching for their gear, and Connor’s already racing ahead of him.  _ Saint Mary’s and Plymouth.  _ “No response yet, guys - we already have three officers on the scene. Reed, Chen, and Anderson.” Fowler scrubs a hand across his face. “I probably don’t need to tell anybody this, but it looks like Reed’s sting went south. Active duty - you guys are on standby until we have an update. The rest of you, get out of here. I’ll see you all in the morning.”

Connor stays standing, straight and statue still, as the babble of the bullpen breaks out around him again. Not so long ago, he’d already be out the door and heading for the nearest easy-to-hotwire squad car. But not so long ago, he also had the full might of Cyberlife’s servers backing up his strained processors, not this strained, jangling, lagging feeling in his head that makes colors too bright and sounds too sharp. He’s  _ tired.  _ He’s tired, Hank has backup, and Sumo is probably hungry. 

_ Where are you going?  _ Nines asks, as Connor turns off his monitor and checks the power settings, ensuring the algorithm will keep crunching away overnight. 

_ Home,  _ Connor replies, allowing the association of a happy dog and a blue fuzzy blanket to tag along with the message. 

Nines seems to hesitate, watching as Connor packs a handful of things into his messenger back.

_ I think you should stay here. _

_ I’m not on night duty until next month.  _

_ You don’t want to wait for Lieutenant Anderson? _

Connor shoots a glance over at his counterpart, torn somewhere between annoyance and confusion. These roundabout questions are  _ very  _ unlike Nines. 

_ He knew it might be a late night,  _ Connor replies brusquely. He swings his messenger bag over his shoulder and heads for the door.

And Nines follows him. Nines actually follows him, catching his arm as Connor steps out into the cold late winter wind.

“I think you should stay here,” he says, and he says it out loud, which is odd enough to put a pause on the annoyance sizzling under Connor’s skin. He just wants to go home, but...but Nines doesn't like to speak out loud if he can avoid it. And if he’s speaking to another android, he can certainly avoid it. 

“Why?” Connor twitches his arm away. Nines’ blue eyes stay locked on his face, his LED yellow and flickering rapidly. 

“I received some...advanced information about the shooting. From Detective Reed,” Nines says, slowly, as though he’s pausing to select each word as he reaches it. Something deep behind Connor’s eyes sparks with terror. 

“ _ Is Hank--” _

“None of our people are injured. The shooting broke out before they arrived on the scene.” Nines says, shaking his head. “But...it was a multiple shooter scenario. There was…” his LED turns red, and stays that way. “An RK800 was caught in the crossfire.”

“Oh.” For a moment, Connor’s mind is blank. No tasks, no prompts, no analysis or information reports. “...who?”

“55.”

“Is he…”

“Unrecoverable,” Nines says softly. “Pronounced at the scene. A few minutes ago.”

Connor raises a hand half-consciously to his cheek, running a finger along the seam where a tiny number is printed, hidden by his skin, ending in 52. He’s encountered 55 before - he’s encountered all the remaining RK800 models, awoken after the passage of the Tabula Rasa Act. 55, like a growing number of the blank slate deviants, preferred his number to a traditional name. He had developed an interest in animal medicine. He’d found a potential placement at a prestigious veterinary institute...he’d been planning to leave the Detroit entirely. And now he was dead.

There had only ever been ten of them. Now it was down to seven. 

“Come inside.” Nines touches Connor’s shoulder, his skin pulled back to expose his metallic black fingertips. “Reed and Lieutenant Anderson should be back soon.”

_ Wait for Hank,  _ he keeps coming back to that. “I told him I’d meet him at home.”

“Connor, he just responded to a homicide--”

“He’s a homicide detective,” Connor snaps, annoyance getting the better of him. “It’s his  _ job.” _

Nines lets his hand fall from Connor’s shoulder, head tipped to one side. “Hank just responded to a homicide scene,” he repeats, in his soft, low voice, “containing a dead body that would have been, to a human, indistinguishable from  _ you.” _

And just like that, Connor’s too loud buzzing brain is blank again. 

“It is your decision of course,” Nines says. His LED is red again. “But you should wait for Hank.” And he turns back through the station’s double doors, leaving Connor alone in the parking lot.

 

Once back inside, Connor can’t help but notice that he’s far from the only off-duty officer remaining. Ben Collins has a granddaughter to pick up from choir practice, but Chris is still at his desk, and Mickie has dragged her chair (and Wren Caryou) over to Stu Jetrain’s, presumably to start another argument about baseball. Connor bypasses his own workstation, still chewing its way through the algorithm, to perch on the edge of Nines’ desk and pick up a file of the stack waiting to be digitized. Nines doesn’t bother to look up at him, but his LED flickers bright blue.  It could be any other shift change, if not for the sudden hush that falls every time the scanner in Fowler’s office crackles to life.

It was approaching 10 o’clock, and Connor was considering calling Hank’s neighbor to ask if she’d let Sumo out again, when the doors opened to admit Tina Chen, damp and disheveled with her hair in a messy ponytail and her bulletproof vest dangling from one hand. 

“It’s safe to unpucker guys, everyone’s fine,” she said, to the roomful of eyes looking for two more detectives. “Fireworks were pretty much over before we got there. Tell you all about it once I’ve talked to the boss.” She slings her vest and her damp coat over her desk chair and heads for Fowler’s office, pausing to mess up Wren’s hair in passing. And then she catches Connor’s eye and jerks her head towards the doors. 

Connor tips his head, thinking as she walks away...but the prompt has already installed itself in the corner of his vision. It’s a familiar one, although it tends to flicker between two versions these days.  _ Find Lieutenant Anderson. Find Hank. Find Lieutenan- Find Hank.  _

_ Find Hank. _

It doesn’t take long for Hank to be found. No sooner has Connor stepped out onto the dark sidewalk, than a powerful hand is grabbing his arm and hauling him into the shadows under the wall, and Connor finds himself crushed against Hank’s chest, Hank’s arms wrapped around him in a bruising hug. 

Connor has learned that Hank is actually quite affectionate, in his own cantankerous way...but he sometimes seems hesitant these days to touch Connor, the way he often did before the revolution. Fewer hands on his shoulder or pressed against his back to guide him, although Connor often sees him reach out to touch and then think better of it, a fleeting little hesitation in the corner of his vision. 

And no more hugs. Not since the first time, the only time, the time he was so surprised he stumbled and all but fell against Hank’s chest, and Hank’s laugh ruffled through his hair as he caught him. Different day, different place, blinding winter sun not half-frozen almost-spring rain and windy night...but the same prompt. After the blood and the bright lights and the killing cold in the Zen Garden, the sea of faces blurred by the lights and his finger locking against the trigger of a gun...that was the only thing left, the little blinking objective guiding him back to a snowy lot under the freeway.

_ Find Hank.  _

Connor relaxes, releasing locked spinal components with a shudder that runs through his core, lets himself lean into Hank’s warm, solid frame and settle his arms around Hank’s waist.  Hank’s breath ruffles his hair, not in a laugh but in a long, shaky sigh as he bends his head to rest on Connor’s shoulder. Connor hides his face in Hank’s neck as his processors buzz with irrelevant streams of data - the nanoskin on his palms has retracted, Connor realizes, and with nothing to focus on his exposed sensors are simply reporting everything they detect. A primary function given his core purpose...but it all fades to a background hum against the feeling of Hank holding him. There are a handful of prompts still hanging in the corner of his vision, and Connor is quite certain he could go on ignoring them forever. 

Eventually, Hank’s whipcord-tight posture relaxes marginally, and the flood of information settles enough for Connor to perform a surreptitious scan for injuries. Hank appears unharmed, although his body chemistry indicates a receding flood of stress and fear hormones. 

Hank gently sets both hands on Connor’s shoulders and pushes him back, and Connor allows it, somewhat reluctantly; he suspects it would be discourteous, as well as rather illogical, to follow his initial impulse and cling like a koala. But Hank only shifts him far enough to get a good look at him, his bloodshot eyes scanning down the length of Connor’s body, pupils still dilated with residual adrenaline. And then, to Connor’s  _ complete  _ surprise, he cups one palm against his cheek, and runs the pad of his thumb over Connor’s forehead. 

He’s conducting his own, much cruder scan of his partner, Connor realizes.  Checking for injuries. The sparse details of the crime scene Nines shared with him flit through his mind. Checking for  _ bullet holes.  _

Hank shuts his eyes and, with a quick shake of his he tugs Connor back against his chest. Connor manages to follow the movement much more smoothly this time, leaning in as Hank runs a hand down his back as though double-checking that he’s still alive and whole. 

“ _ Christ,”  _ he mumbles, his voice a low rumble against Connor’s chest.

“Hank?”

“ I thought it was you, ” Hank whispers into his hair, and for a second he squeezes Connor bone-cracking tight. “ _ I thought it was you.” _

 

No one pays them much attention when they slip back into the bullpen, even though Hank’s arm is still draped around Connor’s shoulders, as though he’s reluctant to let him wander too far away. Most of the other detectives are clustered around Tina’s desk, where a calendar is open on her screen. 

“Hank!” She hollers across the bullpen. “You want Reed Watch Monday or Tuesday lunch?”

Hank groans, dragging a hand down his face. “Why don’t we just get the nurses to set  _ him  _ up with an IV drip…”

“You still have to take a shift, Hank.”

“Fine, gimme Tuesday.” Hank catches the look of confusion Connor and a few other, younger uniforms are giving them. “Rookie from the 10th caught a stray bullet responding to the call,” he says with a sigh. “She’s in surgery, probably be fine, but…” he shrugs. “Reed’s not gonna leave the hospital ‘til she does. He pulls this martyr shit every time there’s collateral on one of his operations. So we take turns going over there to shove food in him once in awhile.”

“Nines! You want Wednesday?” Tina barks. “Cause you’re getting Wednesday.” Connor doubts any of the humans present catch the millisecond moment that Nines’ shock shows on his face, before he simply nods and redirects his attention to his workstation, LED flickering.

“Anderson! Debrief!” 

Hank waves a hand at Fowler, standing in the door of his office. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.” His arm slips off Connor’s shoulder, and Connor instantly wants it back. He’s been running too many parallel processes to have a clear memory-recording of the sensation, and he regrets it immediately.

“Connor?”

Connor shakes himself and looks up at Hank, and finds he can’t ascribe an emotion to the expression on his partner’s face. 

“Connor, I…” Hank sighs and rubs his eyes again. “Never mind. We’ll get out of here soon, ok?” And he does that infuriating thing, the twitch of his hand like he wants to touch again Connor and then thought better of it, before trudging over to the captain’s office. 

“Ey, Connor. Check this out.” Chris waves him over once Fowler’s door has clicked shut, and points at his workstation screen. “I don’t know if it’s something but it sure ain’t nothing.”

There’s an ID photo of a young woman with round blue eyes and reddish chin length hair on the screen, along with a grainy video that looks like security camera footage. The date of birth indicates she’s 25. Her face looks about half that. Connor has been awake for nearly 18 hours and it’s showing, an overload of unsynthesized data making his processors sluggish. “Who’s that?”

“ _ That,”  _ Chris says, with a grin unique to a detective with a bombshell to drop, “is Adelaide Mirr.” He pokes a key, and the ID photo is replaced by a police file. “Officially a missing person since January ninth and it only gets weirder from there. Told you I’d seen that name somewhere.”

“The original programmer of the malware mods is  _ missing?”  _ Connor leans over his shoulder, scanning through the cover page of the file. “Who reported it?”

“Yeah, that’s where it starts getting weird. We did. She -” Chris glances at the pronouns on the ID, and corrects himself. “Whoops.  _ They  _ were tapped as a potential witness in the Cyberlife indictment hearings, and the process servers hit a brick wall trying to serve the subpoena. Servers from the  _ Department of Justice  _ mind you. Those fed guys don’t fuck around. Anyway.” Chris brings up the grainy video. “This is the last confirmed sighting anyone’s been able to come up with before they vanished. And it’s from  _ August.” _

He clicks play, and a tiny, grainy Addie Mirr spins around in a high backed chair to address a tall person in a stylish suit. TThey walk with a limp, and the video tags identify them as Brad Ioh Cane, a former Cyberlife VP. Behind them, a three-monitor workstation is hooked up to a deactivated android, dangling limp on a maintenance frame.

_ “Is this gonna be about the fish? Cause believe me the Lord on High made sure I heard all about the fish.”  _ Their voice has a trace of an Australian accent, filtered through half a dozen other regions. 

_ “Fish? What the-- No. No this is not about a fish” _

Connor feels his eyelids twitching, failed error reports stinging through his skull.  _ Addie I swear to God. Addie, I swear -  _

“Addie, the thing had a  _ gun,”  _ Connor mouths, a second before the grainy Brad Cane explodes. “ _ Addie, the thing had a gun! It had a gun! Do you have any idea--” _

Chris pauses the video, looking at Connor with his eyebrows raised. “You seen this before, man?”

Connor squeezes his eyes shut to stop the twitching, and drops into a nearby chair without bothering to open them. 

“Yes. I have. I’m there.” He jabs a finger at the limp white doll, dangling lifeless behind Addie Mirr. “That’s me. It’s...it’s not me, it’s 51, its...I have his memories. He was there. I was there.” 

_You know its not me you were there._ _You were there when he got shot in the face. When I got shot in the face. When Reed--when Reed had a gun, Reed didn't shoot, Reed never drew Hank drew his gun and Reed never the deviant shot him shot me shot--_ it all screams through his head in a tenth of a second, it feels like something's burning, bubbling inside his skull, pressing against his temple ready blow to his LED out of his skin. He presses his fingers over the flickering light, forces a deep breath in and out, trying to cool his stressed components, opens his eyes. 

“Addie Mirr didn’t just program the base of the malware mods. Addie Mirr programmed  _ me.” _

“God  _ damn.”  _ Chris whistles softly, scrolling through the missing persons file. “PI on this case about to get his ass chewed for missing  _ that. _ ”

Connor frowns. _He’s_ missing something. Something Chris said. (He wants to go home and hug Sumo. He wants Hank go get out of his debrief. He wants to go home and hug  _ Hank. _ ) Oh. Right.

“Who were they being subpoenaed to testify against?”

Chris shoots him that bombshell grin again. “Yeah, that one’s the kicker.” He pulls up another file. Connor takes one look at it and seriously considers just crawling under a desk and never moving again.

“Elijah Kamski.”


	3. Witness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You didn't think I'd forgotten, did you? IDC if people keep telling me hankcon is dying or my schedule keeps getting crazy, I'll keep picking away at If/Then as long as *I* want to keep telling this story! (And a big thank you to the very sweet commenters who went out of their way to tell me they were still waiting!) This is a short chapter in the name of getting something posted and getting my momentum back, but it means a decent chunk of the next chapter is already written! I hope you're ready for sexual tension...

Hank arrives at work late (by his new, android-roommate-enhanced) standards, clutching a double espresso and nursing the kind of tension headache that used to be his excuse to break out the whiskey, back in the bad days - if he had to feel like shit in the morning, at least he could have the pleasure of getting wasted the night before. He and Connor were both slow to get moving that morning, and the android was still off the clock - he said he had a few errands to run before he went into the precinct, and his sprawling mapping algorithm still had a few hours left to go. 

The whiskey stayed on its shelf last night, a fact which is mildly surprising even to him...and has a lot more to do with Connor’s constant, steady presence than Hank’s own willpower. He also hadn’t gotten much in the way of sleep last night, which is decidedly less surprising. He’s been through this song and dance well enough to know that the memory is going to be around for awhile, vivid and sickly and definite as the realization that he’s about to puke: the thick streams of thirium running over blank, unblinking brown eyes, the surface of one of them shattered like a spiderweb and blue blood caking in the long eyelashes. It comes back without the slightest warning, and with it the aching, empty,  _ familiar  _ feeling, the feeling that brings the smell of spilled diesel and highway flares and hospital disinfectant, the sensory backdrop of the bottom dropping out of his world all over again. 

At least until Reed had gotten his attention, put himself bodily between Hank and the downed android lying in the street.  _ Anderson. Anderson! Hank, it’s not him, it’s not Connor, okay? Hank!  _ He’d shoved his phone in Hank’s face, forced the picture into his line of site, Connor sitting at his desk, looking over his shoulder, looking tired and exasperated and confused.  _ Nines sent it to me like, fuck, five seconds ago. He’s at the precinct. It’s not Connor.  _

They’d both been around too long to get hung up in feeling guilty about the relief - someone was still dead, but not the person you’d been afraid it was. Some deaths hurt more than others, that was just how humans  _ worked.  _ You’d go crazy trying to mourn every stupid tragedy the world tried to kick your way. 

One of the androids on the reception counter waves him over before he has a chance to swipe through the security gate. “Lieutenant Anderson? You have a visitor. She says the matter is urgent.”

“Fucking  _ great,”  _ Hank sighs, adjusting the strap of his messenger bag so it cuts into his neck a little less.  _ Urgent matters  _ almost never are, especially from impromptu visitors,  _ especially  _ for high-ranking detectives. But the receptionist is nodding him towards a tall, businesslike woman in a long white coat, and Hank heaves an immediate sigh of relief. 

“Robin. Hey, what’s up? If you’re worried about the thing last night--”

Hank’s ex wife smiles as she stands to greet him, slipping her phone back into her pocket. “Won’t pretend I wasn’t watching the scanners. Everything shook out okay?”

Hank sighs, scraping a hand through his hair. “Rookie beat cop popped out of cover and caught a bullet somewhere nasty - she’ll be okay, though. Fireworks were basically over by the time we got there, shooters on both sides are in the tank as we speak. You haven’t been waiting long, have you?”

“Thought I’d be waiting longer,” Robin grins, punching him none too gently in the bicep. “Lookit you, shaved and showered and in the office by nine.” Her smile softens as she looks up at him - although between her heels and her natural height she doesn’t have to look up  _ much.  _ “It’s a good look on you, Hank.”

Hank bodily resists the urge to duck his head and rub at the back of his neck; doing so would only make the blush rushing up his cheeks more obvious. Robin’s always had that power over him. 

“Yeah, yeah, you didn’t come out here just to compliment my grooming, Jonathan Van Ness. What’s up?”

Robin sighs, her grin slipping. “Officially, I suppose I’m here to speak to Lieutenant Anderson. I hear you and your partner are on that...that android virus thing? Those freeware mods hurting deviants.”

Hank tips his head, listening. In all the years they were married, and all the years since that they’ve been friends, Robin’s never once abused her access to the DPD. If she has something for him, it’s something important. 

“There’s someone you should meet,” Robin says, and turns her head towards the benches at the edge of the busy entrance hall. Hank belatedly spots her boyfriend, Dan, seated next to a pretty, dark haired young woman, and raises a hand in greeting. “Honora?” Robin calls. “C’mere, honey.”

The girl next to Dan looks up, and Hank realizes she’s an android - and an old one at that. She doesn’t wear an LED, but the signs are obvious. She’s got that old-school china doll look that the earliest consumer androids had: clean and plastic and uncanny-valley perfect, with Barbie-shiny hair in spiral ringlets and pink cupid lips. She looks nervously from Robin to Dan, blinking too-long lashes with a mechanical, doll like click and Dan puts an arm gently around her shoulders, murmuring something that doesn’t carry through the noisy lobby. 

“She belonged to Dan’s parents,” Robin says softly, as they make their way over. “Got her when his brother was little, in the early ‘20s. The TRA crews found her in their storage, a few weeks ago - she’d been there almost ten years, barely remembered a damn thing about the world. She’s been with us ever since.” 

Early 2020s... _ Jesus,  _ Hank thinks. That’d make Honora the oldest android he’s met by a long shot. One of the oldest in existence. 

“Hi Honora,” he says, gentle as he can manage. Honora shrinks closer to Dan, just like Connor does when he’s scared and trying to hide it, 18 years or 18 months old... _ the more things change, the more they stay the same.  _ Hank adjusts gears, kneeling down and adapting a variant of his ‘talking to scared kids’ approach. “My name’s Hank. I’m a detective, but Robin’s been my best friend for a long time. She says you have something to tell me?”

Honora looks up at Dan, too-perfect chestnut ringlets bobbing around her heart-shaped face. Her little pearl earrings are a part of her earlobe, molded from the same plastic with shiny paint smudged a little around the seams. 

Dan squeezes her shoulder. “Hank’s the detective investigating Ana’s case. You can talk to him, okay?”

Ana. Hank knows that name instantly. Ana, another older domestic droid, who’d found a new life as a fitness instructor. Right before a certain black-market download promising to update her facial expressions melted her memory core. 

“You’re a friend of Ana’s?” Hank asks, and Honora nods. Like most consumer models she doesn’t cry, but there’s a telltale jitter in her hands, and the whirr of fans inside her chassis. “I’m sorry for your loss. Let’s find somewhere quiet to talk, okay?” He catches the receptionist’s eye. “Ellie, can you take Honora and Dan to one of the conference rooms? I’ll be there in a minute.”

Ellie nods briskly to him and smiles at Honora, holding out a white palm to the older android. Honora hides her hand behind her back before she reaches out to complete the interface, and Hank realizes she’s too old to have liquid nanoskin - it must blink out in solid patches, and she hides the change like it’s something embarrassing.

Dan gives Hank a grateful nod before he follows Honora, arm around her shoulders again. Dan’s a few years younger than Hank, old money, surgeon, Mayo-Clinic trained, could’ve been a double for Captain America back in the day...and is also one of the kindest, funniest, most basically  _ good  _ dudes Hank’s every met. And it’s  _ just  _ like Robin, he reflects, to find a new guy who’s not only an upgrade on Hank in every way, but is also too nice to even dislike

“What’ve you got for me?” Hank murmurs to Robin, as soon as the androids are out of earshot. Robin sighs and shakes her head.

“Not a whole lot, man. She’s been friends with Ana for awhile - we found her one of those Jericho support groups, y’know, for the Tabula Rasa androids who were in storage, or deactivated. They all go out to one of those thirium bars once in awhile. It all seemed normal, but when she found out about Ana…” Robin flicks her fingers in the air. “ _ Boom.  _ Just inconsolable...I know she’s new to grief and all that but this was something else. She’s  _ scared,  _ Hank. She knows something, and I think she’s afraid it’ll get her in trouble.”

Hank nods, slowly. Androids are hard to read, especially old ones, but he saw something similar in Honora’s stiff china-doll features. Not the fear you see in the face of a criminal; the fear you see in the face of a victim . The kind of fear that marks out abuse survivors and whistleblowers. 

Robin puts her hand on his arm, and gives him a long, hard look. “She’s had a hard life, Hank. She was just barely starting to figure out who she was when all this happened. We swore up and down she wouldn’t be in trouble if she talked to you--”

“She won’t be in trouble,” Hank promises, with more certainty than he feels. “We’re not looking to make any arrests today.”

“No arresting who?” Connor says, right behind him.

“You have  _ got  _ to start making more noise when you move,” Hank grumbles over Robin’s laughter, once his heart rate has returned to normal. “We’ve got a lead on the malware thing. Android friend of one of the victims.”

He catches Connor up on the way to the conference room. It's a warmer, cushier cousin to the interrogation room across the hall: there's lampshades and flowers, and the two way mirror has a pretty frame, but the door still only opens from the outside. Connor takes it all in, mostly in silence, his big weird brain no doubt already racing ahead of Hank’s. Just outside the door to the conference room, he pauses and holds out a hand, almost touching Hank’s chest. 

“Can I have a moment to talk to her alone? Android to android.” His eyes flick to the side - to the discrete door to the observation chamber. Hank gives him a long, careful look, and then nods, nudging Robin around the corner, into the dim little room behind the mirror. On the other side of the glowing rectangle in the wall, Connor’s saying something to Dan, who nods and squeezes Honora’s shoulder before he leaves. He sits primly in one of the threadbare armchairs, and Honora watches him through the ringlets falling around her face - she looks like she’s preconstructing a path out the door, ready to bolt at any second. 

“So is he the one who-” Robin begins, an instant before Connor meets Honora’s eyes and asks “How long have you had that mod, Honora?”

Honora quails away from him, her too-long lashes fluttering, and Connor’s hand shoots out, lighting fast, to catch her wrist. Her skin pulls back automatically at the touch...with the smooth, fluid dissolve of modern, liquid nanoskin. Hank doesn’t dare look away from the two androids, but he feels Robin go rigid beside him.  _ Yup, so that’s new. _

Connor slips off his chair to kneel next to Honora, still holding her hand. “It’s okay,” he says softly, and he says it aloud - there’s every chance her systems are just too simple, too outdated to interface with his. There are tears pooling in the corners of her eyes, tears she didn’t allow before. “It’s okay, you didn’t do anything wrong.” 

_ Because there’s no laws to protect deviant androids from whatever shit people decide to sell ‘em,  _ Hank thinks.  _ We jumped right the fuck on protecting us from you, but who’s protecting  _ you  _ from  _ us?

There’s a...change to Honora’s face. The way she moves, the way she holds herself: she shuts her eyes, and her eyelids move smoothly, not that doll-like, stuttering click. There are tiny tension wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and something flexes in her temples when she clenches her teeth - all the tiny little details that consumer androids didn’t have until just a few years ago. 

“Almost a month,” she says, a tiny, electric buzz in her voice. “I got it...I got it two weeks before Ana. I took her...I-I-” she wrenches her hand away from Connor’s and buries her face in exposed white hands. “I told her she had to have it, everybody had it, I... _ I’m the reason she’s dead.  _ I told her it was safe!”

 

“Fucking fuck  _ me,”  _ Hank groans, watching lines of code scroll across the projection hovering above Connor’s palm. “No  _ wonder  _ it’s so goddamned hard to track.”

“This is incredibly sophisticated software,” Connor says. He’s perched on the corner of Hank’s desk again, his eyes darting back and forth at an inhuman speed that’s making Hank feel vaguely queasy. “Honora couldn’t give me the full code through an interface, but just at surface level...wow. No wonder it spread so quickly.”

“And it only bugs out and gets all brain melty some tiny fraction of the time. How many androids does Honora know with the upgrade?”

“At least 30,” Connor says softly. “And Ana was the only one it hurt.”

“One in thirty. That we know of. Christ.” Hank leans back in his desk chair and tries not to think about how badly he needs a drink. 

“It might not even be intentionally malicious.” Tina Chen’s appropriated Connor’s chair, eyes fixed on her own tablet. “It’s been altered pretty recently - whoever’s selling it must have tried to make it backwards compatible. Cyberlife didn’t make updates like this for…” she trails off, eyes flicking to Connor. 

“For obsolete versions,” Connor finishes for her, with a too-bright, too-brittle smile. He clenches his hand around the projection, green and white light blazing briefly between his fingers. “To encourage their owners to mothball them and purchase the newest model.”

Clanging silence descends as the two humans studiously avoid both Connor’s eyes and each others’.

“How long until we can get the full code?” Hank asks, mainly for something to say, and Connor shrugs one shoulder.

“Rose says a few days at least, if she can get it at all. Mods like that integrate so much with your systems...it’s hard to tease it all out once its installed. Especially for Honora...the documentation for those early systems isn’t great.”

“So our best bet is still getting a clean version. Pre install.”

Connor nods. “Those new android clubs seem to be the hot spot for it, no surprise. Honora’s download came from a place called Barcode, and that’s where she sent Ana…”

_ Because what’s the harm?  _ Hank thinks to himself.  _ You’re too young to remember meth and heroin and you’ve been in a concrete box since before Red Ice was a thing, and ‘all your friends are doing it…’  _ there were so many new deviants as naive and vulnerable as college kids on their first weekend away from home, and almost nothing in place to protect them.

"And here I thought we might get to go home at five for once," Hank grumbles, trying and failing to stretch the kinks out of his spine. He straightens up and claps Connor on the shoulder. "Better find your dance pants, kid." Connor gives him a look of mild horror. "Looks like we're going clubbing."

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on twitter [@kenjiandco](https://twitter.com/kenjiandco)  
> And occastionally on tumblr: [kenjiandcompany](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/kenjiandcompany)


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